Vibration monitoring and faults detection using wavelet techniques

This paper introduces an efficient approach for fault detection in rotating machinery by analyzing its vibration signals using wavelet techniques. Specifically our approach uses the wavelet packet transform (WPT) to decompose the vibration signals in the wavelet packet space, in order to reveal the transient information in these signals. Faults are efficiently detected by exploiting the mean values of the energy in the detail signals. The wavelet-based approach is also compared with the traditional Fourier-based one. Both analysis and an extensive simulation of the two approaches clearly show the superiority of the WPT-based approach over the Fourier-based one, in efficiently diagnosing faults from vibration signals.